The field of the present invention relates generally to manipulation of media objects or the like, such as photographs, video, audio files, and websites. More particularly, it relates to associating annotations with media objects.
Consumer photography has made it exceedingly simple for people to capture images, which they do at an increasing rate. The growing rate of photo capture is driven by the proliferation of capture devices (such as digital cameras and camera-phones) as well as decreasing storage costs. At the same time, however, creation of semantic metadata about the photo content that is relevant to the content or context of the media's capture environment remains an elusive goal. This type of metadata is required in order to facilitate retrieval from large collections of photographs and media. Completely automated tools for annotating media, though improving, have not proven sufficient in providing complete and accurate semantic metadata. Manual annotation interfaces, even on desktop computers, remain time-consuming, often presenting the user with an overwhelming number of photos to annotate with custom created annotations.
Accordingly, improved mechanisms for facilitating media annotation as performed by a user are needed.